Managing a large volume of documents in an enterprise can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone.  For document management to be viable, all documents must be easily and quickly accessible, as well as findable.

Every organization requires a strong system to keep its documentation safe and organized in a way that allows participants to quickly find them and work on them as needed in a collaborative fashion. For storing, maintaining, and sharing files, SharePoint is an excellent tool and framework for end-to-end enterprise-class document management.

The digitalization of the document lifecycle from formation to archiving by the SharePoint document management system can dramatically boost worker productivity and lower operating costs significantly.

This article will cover a variety of topics, including what SharePoint is relative to document management, how to create a SharePoint document management system, why you should use it, and much more. Let’s look further.

What is the SharePoint Document Management solution?

SharePoint serves more purposes than just storing documents. It is an effective tool for managing data and collaborating across calendars, tasks, lists, intranet pages, and more in a secure and accessible manner. SharePoint can be utilized as a system for managing data and resolving collaborative challenges in conventional data sharing.

Finding a document stored on a traditional Windows share on a file server with a lot of files can take time and effort.  File shares tend to grow organically, gathering in size as inactive areas grow over time, leading to an overgrown unmanageable set of endless nested folders that are daunting for new users to navigate.

For the fourth time in a row, SharePoint is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Content Services Systems in 2020. More than 850,000 large and medium-sized organizations are currently using SharePoint as a document management tool.

If you want your SharePoint environment to be flexible enough to accommodate the expansion of your business, you should configure it carefully to allow the growth of documents, sites, and libraries without overloading areas beyond best practice metrics.

You should take into account a variety of factors, including the proper organization of sites, lists, and library resources, the development of your types of content (Content Types), the use of folders, privileges, workflows, search, retention, document disposition, metadata, and more. That is why it is critical to create a scalable, extensible and adaptable SharePoint Document Management system centered on a consistent Information Architecture designed around your business.

1. Checking out the types of Document Management systems.

Choose the different documents you want to keep in your SharePoint DMS. It is not a good idea to consolidate all of your company’s files into a single SharePoint Document Library. SharePoint DMS’s main goal is to group slightly related records with the same security controls.  There are significant limits on library size.  A common error is to overload a single library, eventually resulting in both poor performance and sporadic errors.

You should avoid storing documents from different departments in the same document library or DMS without forethought because they will have specific demographics, audiences with other permissions, and varying levels of security.

Instead, you should divide the libraries up into sites, subsites, and libraries.

2. Design metadata for each of the types of categories

In SharePoint, we use metadata to make it more navigable, searchable, effective, and accessible, in contrast to the conventional configuration of folders and sub-folders that consume enormous memory but still don’t keep it all organized as expected.  In reality, it’s a combination of folders and metadata that allows the end user experience to shine.

Folders can be configured to allow for location-based tagging, so the best of both worlds (folders and metadata) can be provided at the same time and with the same user underlying activities.

In addition to a file’s information is its metadata. If you have a lot of content on your SharePoint site, use metadata to categorize the documents, facilitate quick searches, and speed up navigation. File categories can each have their own specific metadata properties.  There’s no real limit to the amount of metadata, but we want to be judicious in the selection, so the metadata serves specific end-user purposes, and is manageable.

So, this is how we configure SharePoint to use metadata. Thus, keyword searches produce the most precise results.

There’s a vast set of metadata types available, from text, lookups, numbers, and currency, to centralized multi-level and multi-lingual enterprise taxonomies.

3. Generate columns for different metadata!

Each metadata field can be separately defined using the Describe the type of that column for every metadata property.

Although it is always considered a recommended practice to generate columns at the site level, you can also generate your column at the library level. You can repurpose your columns on other websites and library resources in this way. Go off to Site Gear Icon > Site Setups > Site Columns (under Web Designer Galleries) > Create to develop columns.

4. Content Type Syndication Hub

The best practice of all is to generate metadata centrally and publish it across the enterprise.  We can configure this for your company, allowing for metadata definitions to be published and propagated across all site collections in the enterprise.  This applies to any metadata, and not simply just managed metadata taxonomies.

5. Develop Content Types

As was already mentioned, metadata aids in the organization of content in content libraries and on SharePoint sites. For example, column groups designated for specific types of content can be grouped into something known as a Content-Type. This carries additional information, such as document retention, and disposition policies carrying the full prescriptive lifecycle for associated documents.  Once applied to a library, once you publish a document to a SharePoint library, you can choose the metadata; if there are multiple Content Types in a library, that can be selected, which drives which fields are available and required for a given document.

6. Create custom content types groups

To make management easier, assign your personalized types of content to new meaningful groups. For instance, you can categorize types of content by departments like HR, finance, IT projects, and others.

In order to make sure that the custom content type groups are at the top of the list of site types of content, groups are set up so that they can be arranged alphabetically.

Generate all of your personalized content types based on the pre-built SharePoint content types. It will enable you to update SharePoint in the future without losing personalization.

The recommended approach is to use a multi-level parent-child hierarchy because it enables you to repurpose content types and build out additional granular content types that each inherit all fields and properties from the parents.  There’s no limit to the depth of hierarchy for Content Types.

7. Add up custom columns to the document directory.

You should now update the library with new custom content types.  This can be done manually, or programmatically across a vast number of libraries using automation, including PowerShell.

•   To get started, return to the settings page for the library.
•   On the page’s bottom, click add different types of content from the actual site.
•   Pick the content types you’ve generated from the lineup on the left side of the web interface and press the Add > button. To save your changes, press OK.

8. Enable Metadata navigation

We have nearly finished with our SharePoint DMS; however, metadata navigation and filtration are unavailable by default and may be enabled manually.  This enables more features to be surfaced for end-users that allow navigation within the library, using a pure metadata approach.

Click Manage site features in the Site Actions segment of the site settings.

9. Locate Metadata Navigation and Filtration on this site, then click Activation process.

This option displays a brief comment, and for SharePoint document management, you should enable metadata browsing and filtration.

•   Visit the library configurations
•   Navigate to Metadata settings by clicking.
•   In the left list, choose the necessary hierarchy fields, then click Add.
•   Configure fully automated column indexing and click OK to save changes if necessary.

Features Of SharePoint Document Management System

 1. Metadata

SharePoint offers comprehensive details on a file’s current status, including the date the file was created, and modified, who made the alteration, whether the most recent modification was accepted or not, version number, and more. Every business stockholder who has direct exposure to the file benefits from having such a thorough understanding of the document’s status and history.

 2. Seamless workflow management

SharePoint supports multiple workflows in an organization. As a result, handling documents for your staff is simple because the document end environment effectively handles the workflow itself. They only need to apply predetermined processes or process tasks assigned to them.

Your company could have many different categories and types of documents, such as contracts, tasks, documents, and more. You can organize these materials in a hierarchy in SharePoint based on your needs.

3. Sophisticated coauthoring

Your SharePoint document management system can acquire some impressive features from the Fluid Framework, making the process quick and easy to manage.

The second benefit is that it offers a componentized document model, allowing the author to divide the content into smaller pieces that can be used as building blocks for other documents, new applications, or projects. As a result, it greatly simplifies data selection throughout your organization.

Thirdly, Microsoft offers intelligent agents that can fetch text for you, translate paperwork, cross-check compliance requirements, and perform other tasks if you are addressing customers in different countries. It will be accessible through Outlook and Teams as well as the entire Microsoft 365 suite.

4. Convenient Integration

Any of Microsoft’s currently available apps can be integrated with SharePoint using PowerAutomate, creating opportunities for more effective collaboration. For ease and convenience, this compatibility is also available on a variety of devices, including mobile ones. SharePoint is also very adaptable, making it simple to alter or remove specific features to meet the needs of your business.

5. End-to-End security

Your data is securely stored by SharePoint. SharePoint automatically saves different iterations of your document information. For instance, you can access a previous version of a document that has since been updated. If a mistake needs to be fixed, this is a great solution for end-user self-service. More restrictions on use allow you to control who sees potentially confidential documents.  Azure Information Rights Management provides an even more robust and fine-grained security control, including the ability to print and restrict access to documents for which rights are later revoked.

Conclusion

The ideal document management system strengthens your powerful arsenal and makes your working teams more effective. However, the discussion above demonstrates why SharePoint is a great option, yet needs carefully considered configuration to bring out the very best for your enterprise.

We hope this blog has helped you learn more about SharePoint document management, including its notable characteristics and step-by-step setup guides.

Feel free to reach out to our knowledgeable staff if you are still unsure about setup, configuration, and best practices. Contact us now, we would be happy to help you.

Microsoft SharePoint has been the best collaborative and content management solution for literally decades. When Microsoft released SharePoint Server 2013, it had several breakthrough features still in use today, such as connection with OneDrive for Business, the launch of Community Forums, and microblogging features.

Like other perpetual license software providers, Microsoft will cease long-term support for Microsoft SharePoint customers in April 2023. While upgrading to the most recent SharePoint Server 2019 is conceivable, there is no direct path to migration from SharePoint 2013. SharePoint migration is the process of migrating all of the content from the current file server or SharePoint to a new and existing environment.  In this article, let us look at the advantages of migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online.

Why Migrate from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online?

Migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online provides you with many advantages, which are listed below:

•   SharePoint Online has no “End of Support,” typically at most ten years in the case of Microsoft SharePoint Servers with everlasting subscriptions.
•   Site proliferation can be better managed, saving engineering time and money while boosting security and technical adaptability.
•   It is constantly updated, so the user would not have to wait for new features or security updates.
•   Microsoft manages it, so administrators rely less on it for infrastructure and updates.
•   It consolidates sites and content into a single Office 365 tenancy, reducing the number of different farms.
•   Avoid the licenses and expense of maintaining on-premises servers and software.
•   Server, site, and disaster recovery are built-in and inherent to the Microsoft cloud.

What Is the Procedure for Migrating from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online?

The migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint Online goes through the two-step procedure: planning of migration and execution of migration. The two-step procedure is described in brief as below:

Planning of migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint Online

The migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online begins with an audit of the current sites and portals. Their number and nature would determine the migration strategy, which may range from simply shifting sites and portals to starting fresh in the cloud. We refer to this as mapping.

After identifying the sites to be moved from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online, the second step is to evaluate governance before migrating the sites. It includes determining how much authority different stakeholders have over the transfer and accessibility, matching on-premises provided based on the cloud, and developing policies for utilizing Microsoft SharePoint in the cloud. Following the establishment of the governance plan, enterprises must determine where they must migrate all the workloads to the cloud.

Executing Migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint online

The execution of migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint online should go through a process as described below:

•   Rather than moving outdated SharePoint 2013 sites, build new sites with the correct template, corresponding to how they would be used in SharePoint Online.
•   Permissions are reviewed, simplified, or flattened where possible and configured in the destination.
•   The on-premises SharePoint 2013 taxonomy and metadata structures are consolidated where possible and replicated in SharePoint Online.
•   Root site information is consolidated and updated with SharePoint Online content.
•   Where sensible, site collections are grouped into Hub(s) for common theme and navigation.

Key Features of SharePoint Migration Tool

• The SharePoint Migration Tool allows you to effortlessly transfer data from Microsoft SharePoint on-premises documents library or your on-premises file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.
• The utility will run automatically and will not affect the production environment.
• The tool will take about two days to scan your area. The utility will report progress in the terminal window throughout this time. When the scan is finished, you can find the result files under the Logs directory.
• Provide a valuable report for existing and finished migrations and task reports to assist in identifying and resolving any issues that may have arisen during the transfer process.
• It has a very user-friendly interface.
• It enables batch transfer from the Share folder, SharePoint on-premises, and CSV files.
• It supports small-scale migrations as well as large-scale migrations.

Post Migration and Pre-Launch Activities

Complex processes, workflows, integrations, and workloads, such as dashboards and ETL for Business Intelligence, must be re-linked just after content is migrated. Review the necessary endpoints, prerequisites, and permissions before utilizing SPMT. You must join Microsoft 365 as a Global or SharePoint admin to migrate at the organizational level. You must be the site administrator for that site collection to transition to the traditional project level. Both SharePoint and file share migrations do not support proxy connections. HTTP connections would fail if Web Browser proxy is configured since SPMT by default does not use system proxy credentials.

You might see problems like “SharePoint login failed” or “can’t load document library,” for instance. You can, however, change the SPMT app’s configuration file so that it uses the system proxy settings. The source SharePoint 2013 and target SharePoint Online environments must be cross-referenced to determine whether the migration was successful.  Scripts may need to be built for specific operations, such as establishing and creating new sites from a request in a Microsoft SharePoint list.

Furthermore, Officials must watch changes in office 365 and SharePoint regularly to determine the impact on the SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online migration, mainly if it is a lengthy process. Microsoft has also created a simple command-line tool called “SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT)” that will analyse the content of your Microsoft SharePoint to assist identify any issues with data that you plan to migrate to SharePoint Online.

Conclusion

You are strongly advised to move the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 to SharePoint Online before the support period expires. Many people who are still using SharePoint 2010 can use the same way to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online.

Most organizations must examine a wide range of factors related to the wider Office 365/ Microsoft 365 ecosystem while moving from SharePoint 2013, because, while technically viable, SharePoint 2013 would not generally be transferred to SharePoint Online on its own.

SharePoint Migrator Tool is a professional migrator tool that can move an unlimited amount of domains, site collections, versions, workflow, metadata, list/libraries, and other items between two SharePoint accounts.

We had a use case where one of our clients had two different SharePoint sites. One SharePoint site was where team members create and modify content.

Another SharePoint site was used by the CEO where team members manually update the finalized content from their site since the CEO wants to only see finalized content.

This allowed for final published content aggregation for review by the CEO in one location.

This way the CEO did not need to go across multiple sites, allowing for a single location for making business decisions easily.

It is quite a tedious process to manually replicate and update content on the CEO’s site in real time. Our client was looking for a way to automate the whole process.

One option is to create a Power Automate workflow on a document library of the source site which will sync the data to the destination-defined document library.

This will work perfectly fine for one source document library. However, challenges will appear when we want to implement the same solution for more than one source document library.

It is not scalable or recommended to create a Power Automate workflow every time we create a new document library on multiple sites, so this approach would not easily be scalable.

There is no out-of-the-box or straightforward way to achieve the requirement of replication across a growing number of source document libraries.

We, therefore, implemented a reliable solution using SharePoint lists and Power Automate which can sync data from multiple document libraries and their folders across multiple sites to the destination folders (CEO Consolidated content).

By using this approach we are able to manage the replication of thousands of folders/files across multiple sources and destinations.

SharePoint Lists structure

1. Create one central Mapping List. In this list, we are managing the source location of different sites and the destination location of the CEO Site.
2. Add Source path and destination path in the central mapping list as per the below example
3. Added an InternalID column in the destination library in which we will store the ID of the source’s folder/file. This InternalID will be used to check whether a folder/file exists or not at the destination location. This will be the key column between the source and the destination.

Power Automate Solution Structure

We need to create a Power Automate solution and will need to create three different Power Automate flows inside the solution as shown below. The Content Replication Parent Flow will run first and inside that flow, we will run two child flows for content replication and for cleaning up files

• Content Replication Parent Flow (Parent Flow])
• Content Replication (Child Flow)
• Clean-up Files (Child Flow)

Power Automate Schedule

From an operational perspective, we schedule the Content Replication Parent Flow daily at midnight.

It will further call the Content Replication and Clean up Flows and will pass the current mapping ID in it.

Content Replication Parent Flow

This Flow extracts the active mappings from the Central Mapping List and loops through each active mapping.

This Flow passes the current mapping details to the Child Flows (Content Replication and Clean Up Flow) as seen in the image below.

Content Replication

1. This Flow will Copy Content from the source to the destination based on the current mapping. It will receive the mapping details from the Parent flow.
2. Loop through all folders/files of the source path mentioned in the mapping and fetches the folder/files modified after the date-time mentioned in the “LastFlowRunTime” column of the central mapping list. After getting all the folder/files it will check folder/file already exists on the equivalent destination path same as the source path using the Internal ID column which we created in the destination library
3. If it exists, then we overwrite it.
4. If it does not exist, then the Flow will create the folder/file

Clean-up Files

1. This Flow will remove files from the destination which were deleted from the source
2. Loop through all folders/files in the destination path mentioned in the mapping and will fetch the folder/files. After getting all the folder/files it will check whether the folder/file already exists in the equivalent source path using the Internal ID column.
3. If the folder/file is not found in the source path, it means that the folder/file was deleted from the source, so we delete it from the destination.
4. This way, it will delete all the files from the destination which were originally deleted from the source.

After implementing the solution, we found that when we move a folder/file to another folder then it does not modify the modified date of the moved subfolder or file.

So content movement between folders and libraries can cause an issue, where the updates don’t get reflected in the destination.

In practice, we found that the moved folder does not get captured in the next cycle of the Power Automate Flow, as we are only synchronizing the folders/file which was modified after the previous Power Automate Flow run, based on the timestamp which we store in “LastFlowRunTime” columns of the central mapping list, and therefore will not get synced to the destination equivalent location.

We had further optimized the solution to overcome this move folder/file issue and made the changes in the solution as shown below.

SharePoint Lists structure

• Create Moved Mapping List (For Moved Folder/File: a complete replica of central mapping list)

Content Replication

1. This Flow will Copy Content from the source to the destination based on the current mapping. It will receive the mapping details from the Parent Flow.
2. Loop through all folders/files of the source path mentioned in the mapping and will fetch the folder/files modified after the value of “LastFlowRunTime”. After getting all the folder/files it will check whether the folder/file already exists on the equivalent destination path the same as the source path using the Internal ID column which we created in the destination library
3. If it exists, then the Flow will overwrite it.
4. f it does not exist, then a further check of the folder/file to see whether it exists anywhere in the destination library. If it exists somewhere in the destination library, then it seems the file has moved to another folder in the source location. If so, it will create an entry for the parent folder of the folder/file in a Moved Mapping List. If it does not exist in the library at all, then the Flow will create it as a new folder/file

Power Automate Solution Structure After adding Move functionality

• Content Replication Parent Flow (Parent Flow)
• Content Replication (Child Flow)
• Clean-up Files (Child Flow)
• Replicate Moved Content (Flow for moved folder/file attached on Moved Mapping SharePoint List on Item create the event)

 Replicate Moved Content

1. This Flow is a complete replica of the Content Replication flow. But it only triggers for the specific moved folder file which we created in the Moved Mapping list while executing the Content Replication Flow.
2. Power Automate will trigger when any new item will be created in the Moved Mapping list and move the folder/file to the destination path mentioned earlier.

In Conclusion, Mirroring the SharePoint document library contents to multiple sites is an important task that needs to be done with care, and having a reliable SharePoint development company with expertise in Microsoft Sharepoint services is crucial for efficient and smooth mirroring.

Summary

While creating a PowerApps app, we needed to add a button that would be visible only for a particular set of users who were present in a specific group in SharePoint. This was accomplished with the help of Flow.  

We would check with the help of Flow that the user that is trying to access the App, is present in the group or not. If yes, the button is available and if not, the button won’t be. 

The approach goes like, 

Step-1

Create a SharePoint Security Group and add the users who would have the access to the button in PowerApps App.

And enable the access to view the members of the Group to Everyone, so that when the user tries to login, not all users would be in the group.  

Step-2

Creating the Flow 

• Create the Flow, with the trigger PowerApps of PowerApps connector. 

• Add an action, Initialize variable of Variables connector. Set the name as isAdministrator to store a Boolean value.

• Add another Initialize variable of Variables connector. Set the name as UserGroupInfo to store a Boolean value. 

• Add an action, Send an HTTP request to SharePoint of SharePoint connector.  

Site Address – Select the site address where the security group is created 

Method – GET 

Uri – api/web/sitegroups/getByName(‘SharePoint Group’)/Users?$filter=Email eq ‘’ 

Replace the SharePoint Group with the name of the group created in Step-1. Here I had created the group ‘Line Manager’.  

Put the cursor pointer in between the single quotes and select the option from PowerApps, SendanHTTPrequesttoSharePoint_Uri from dynamic content window.

• Add an action, Set Variable of Variable connector. Select the variable UserGroupInfo in Name and value as Body from Send an HTTP request to SharePoint from dynamic content. 

• Add an action, Condition of Control Connector. Set the conditional value as variable UserGroupInfo and select the condition is not equal to and in value  to be compared as ‘[]’. 

     Inside the if yes and if no options, 

 For the option if yes, add an action Set Variable of Variable connector. Select the variable  isAdministrator and set the value as true, 

         For option if no, add an action Set Variable of Variable connector. Select the variable isAdministrator and set the value as false. 

• Add an action, Respond to PowerApps of PowerApps connector. Select the text option for the output. Set the variable as isAdminUser and the value as isAdministrator from the Dynamic content. 

The final look of the flow would be like this: 

Step-3

Implementing the Flow with PowerApps App 

After the Flow is ready, lets configure the same with the App to test it. 

On the first screen that would be visible when you run the App, on its OnVisible Property, set the variables as below: 

First, we take the variable isAdmin and set it as false.  

Secondly, we would check with the flow to set the variable UserGroupInfo as the flow’s outcome.   

On the button’s visible property, set it as If(isAdmin, true). SO that if the user is in the SharePoint Group the button would be visible else it would not. 

So when a user is inside the SharePoint Group, the screen would display the button: 

And when the user is not, we display: 

In conclusion, leveraging PowerApps in conjunction with SharePoint groups provides a dynamic solution for implementing role-based access control within your applications.

By utilizing the capabilities of Flow, we have demonstrated how to seamlessly manage user permissions, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access specific features or functionalities.

With Microsoft PowerApps solutions, organizations can not only enhance security measures but also streamline workflows and improve overall efficiency.

Whether it’s creating custom apps tailored to unique business requirements or integrating with existing systems for seamless collaboration, PowerApps empowers businesses to unlock the full potential of their digital ecosystems.

By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can effectively implement role-based security measures in your PowerApps applications, providing a tailored and secure user experience for your organization.

Incorporating Microsoft PowerApps solutions into your development toolkit opens a world of possibilities, enabling you to drive innovation, maximize productivity, and achieve your business objectives with confidence.

Please post your question, if you will find while implementing this process. Thank you.